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Monthly Archives: June 2016

If there is one experience in San Francisco that provides an inordinate amount of potential writing material it is this: the Lyft Line. If you are not familiar with Lyft Line, it is a variation of your traditional ridesharing service, only with a carpool element that makes the fares cheaper for everyone. Naturally when you put yourself at the will of fate, (ie the Lyft app) chaos and absurdity will ensue.

During a recent ride, I was sitting in the front with the driver (a young Asian woman around my age) while an adult father-son duo sat in the back. They proceeded to bicker the entire way to our destination in a manner that can only be described as, “a perfectly written, Woody Allen-esque, family therapy session.” The father would make a comment and the son would instantly reply with a snarky quip, something along the lines of, “God, this is just so like you.” The driver and I sat quietly in the front until we’d dropped off the back seat passengers, at which point we laughed at the ridiculous lack of social awareness in San Francisco.

I had a driver who was visiting from Los Angeles entertain me with the stories of her Lyft line passengers in SoCal (after we dropped off our other passenger who had managed to cram an entire massage table into the back seat of the compact sedan, of course). These stories were always quite involved, given that taking a Lyft line in LA means you might be driving around with the same people for over an hour, sitting in all kinds of traffic. My driver recounted tales ranging from the time she picked up a man who immediately confessed to having just cheated on his wife, to the time she picked up a young woman in the wee hours of the morning from the home of a well known NBA player, only to have the passenger burst out in tears realizing she had forgotten her underwear in the house. That driver claimed she should be paid overtime for all the pro-bono therapy hours she was providing. Maybe this is the next million dollar startup- rideshares driven by professional therapists- god knows this city needs it.

Some of my Lines have been perfectly lovely and entertaining. I had a Lyft line driver who was a retired arborist, who gave us the English and Latin names of every tree lining Oak Street. There was the driver who recounted having three unrelated passengers assigned to her, all named Laura. The passengers celebrated the coincidental pairing by taking group selfies of the “Laura Lyft Line” and then sending the photo out to friends via snapchat. This is San Francisco after all. That same driver also told me about how she has had couples get into her car and proceed to have very serious arguments in her backseat, going so far as to ask for her opinion on their fight, the fact that she had met them ten minutes earlier not mattering whatsoever. This is one story I’ve heard over and over again from drivers, and I find it both curious and entertaining that a ridesharing app can turn unsuspecting Lyft drivers into marital counselors. And you thought you were just signing up to drive people to their destinations. As if.

The combination of these experiences has brought me back to my eleventh grade English class, when we read No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre. While clearly Sartre got a lot of it right about hell being other people, I think in modern day San Francisco one could argue that hell is being trapped in a bad Lyft Line. I joked about this with one driver, picturing what the most perfectly hellish Lyft Line would entail. We decided it would look something like this:

You’ve gotten into a full Lyft line where there are already three other passengers. The single rider in the back seat is talking obnoxiously on the phone while intermittently pausing to ask the driver if couldn’t they please just be dropped off first since they are running so incredibly late. The couple also sitting in the backseat is in the middle of an argument about something that you can’t totally make out, but it does seem to be extremely personal. They’re both close to tears. You quietly make a comment to the driver about how absurd this situation is, to which they laugh, and immediately ask if you’ve got a boyfriend. You’re going the furthest across the city out of any of them, and consequently will be the last to exit the vehicle. The next twenty-five minutes proceed to feel like eternity. *